It is great to find one of similar heart stopping in. Thank you for your wonderful contribution to our Founder's celebration. Many of us here are biding our time until the grand event at Radio City. It will be one of those life-long reminiscences i do believe:). Cheers! ''What connects Nature to the spiritual, or requires the presence of the latter? In positive terms, as Alkis Kontos points out, when nature was still largely experienced as integral, alive and active, 'It was the spiritual dimension of the world, its enchanted, magical quality that rendered it infinite, not amenable to complete calculability; spirit could not be quanified; it permitted and invited mythologization.' And I would add, it still is and does.'' Patrick Curry-Defending Middle-Earth-Tolkien: Myth and Modernity - chapter: 'The Sea: Spirituality and Ethics.'

May the grace of ManwŰ let us soar with eagle's wings! In the air, among the clouds in the sky Here is where the birds of Manwe fly Looking at the land, and the water that flows The true beauty of earth shows With the stars of Varda lighting my way In all the realms this is where I stay In the realm of ManwŰ S˙limo

a joyful word for TORn. Yes, it is a place of down home values and warmth. And because of it, we will be around for a long time to come. Your Abe was such a fascination. All the best to you:). ''What connects Nature to the spiritual, or requires the presence of the latter? In positive terms, as Alkis Kontos points out, when nature was still largely experienced as integral, alive and active, 'It was the spiritual dimension of the world, its enchanted, magical quality that rendered it infinite, not amenable to complete calculability; spirit could not be quanified; it permitted and invited mythologization.' And I would add, it still is and does.'' Patrick Curry-Defending Middle-Earth-Tolkien: Myth and Modernity - chapter: 'The Sea: Spirituality and Ethics.'

May the grace of ManwŰ let us soar with eagle's wings! In the air, among the clouds in the sky Here is where the birds of Manwe fly Looking at the land, and the water that flows The true beauty of earth shows With the stars of Varda lighting my way In all the realms this is where I stay In the realm of ManwŰ S˙limo

I seem to recall trying charcoal as a kid, and it just smudged all over everything. But now I've got access to instruction on the internet and in books (and hopefully in person at some point, from you or someone else who knows what they're doing). Plus I'd probably been given whatever was cheapest, which might've been overly-crumbly. So I guess it's worth another shot!

I'm picturing the news article now, "Yesterday's concert at Radio City Music Hall was temporarily disrupted when an audience member had to be carried out. She was initially declared dead of squee, but then heroically struggled back to life . . ."

I promise I'll try to contain myself. Hmmm, maybe at the first sign of squeeing, someone should smack me with a wet noodle or something. Or is there another cure for squee?

"Ah, how ironic, the addictive qualities of Sauronĺs master weapon led to its own destruction. Which just goes to show, kids - if you want two small and noble souls to succeed on a mission of dire importance... send an evil-minded b*****d with them too." - Gandalf's Diaries, final par, by Ufthak.

On the film, several of us (Alan Lee, Grant Major, Dan Hennah and myself) agreed on all the various aspects of what the hobbits' alphabet would look like, and how Bilbo should write it. This included having accent marks over ALL the vowels (though I followed a self-imposed rule to restrict it to sounded vowels, or the first of the two vowels in a diphthong, etc, so that the text wasn't quite so cluttered). It certainly gave the Shire writings, the Red Book, etc an old-worldly, rustic charm. And it gave a tenuous link between the tengwar writings of Middle-earth and those written perhaps in some "newer letters, sometimes used now for the Common Tongue" (this is simply my justification - the fact that things are written in Latin characters at all is simply to allow accessibilty to audiences, of course).

So for the writings of some of the other races, I retained the most Tolkienesque of the various accent marks: the triple-dot (or triadic mark, as I started to call it) over the A, to maintain a kind of continuity. So you'll see that triple dot in my merchandising versions of Gondorian words like Faramir, Aragorn, for example, whereas Rohirric ones drop it but use Tolkien's acute accent over some of the Es.

And that's the only reason. It's purely decorative, giving a Tolkien flavour, and to put a kind of stamp of belonging that says "this is from the LOTR movies".

It's amazing how much thought went into things like little dots. What a great example of the attention to detail that made these movies (and associated merchandise) so beautiful! Thanks for explaining.